VirusTotal for Android

Years ago there was much fuzz about mobile malware, yet the devices themselves were so limited that the claims made were considered no more than hypes developed exclusively with marketing purposes so as to sell more mobile phone antivirus solutions.

The rise of smartphones has made what once were deceitful claims a real threat. Attackers are well aware that users are moving to mobile devices and performing most of their online activity on them (ebanking, social networking, etc.), and thus have started to target these platforms. Examples of these threats are the Zeus Mitmo banking trojan, fake Angry Birds or Opfake.

VirusTotal is strongly committed to making the Internet a safer place by helping end-users in securing their systems, be it desktop PCs or mobile phones. This is why we have developed and released VirusTotal for Android, an Android application that lets you check all the applications on your phone/mobile device against VirusTotal.

You can download the application directly from the Google Play store:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.virustotal

The application will perform hash lookups for all the applications installed in your mobile device. If the application was scanned by VirusTotal in the past and detected by one or more antivirus vendors its results icon will be a red droid, green if it was not detected. A blue question mark will appear next to applications that are unknown to VirusTotal.

You can upload to VirusTotal any application that was not seen in the past, in order to do this you will have to provide your VirusTotal Community credentials, the application will then use your API key to perform the uploads. The file will enter a low priority scanning queue and the application will trigger an Android notification whenever the scan ends.

The application has some other features such as rescanning, filtering or detailed results, read more about  them at its documentation site. The application was initially coded as part of a University project supervised by Urko Zurutuza from the University of Mondragon, it was later polished and recoded by Anthony Desnos, the most recent member of our team and our resident Android expert. We hope you find it useful!

Please note that VirusTotal for Android does not prive real-time protection and, so, is no substitute for any antivirus product, just a second opinion regarding your apps.